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Jan. 20th, 2003 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaI forget sometimes that not all Christians are fundamentalists, even though I know better.
I spent the last Thursday thru Saturday in Cognitive Coaching training (the last day of the training is in February). I love the textbook. Every few pages it states (sometimes quite bluntly, sometimes obliquely) one of the laws of magick. Not, of course, that anyone related to CC would recognize them as such, but that's what they are. So I'll make a little delighted note in the margins. The whole thing is very, very compatible with Pagan values in general and mine in particular; in some ways, CC is all about embodying the Temperance card in order to manifest the Magician in other people. Again, not that they'd ever use or recognize that metaphor.
The trainer, who is one of the two current high-muckety-mucks of Cognitive Coaching (the two original author-implementors having retired), is obviously a person of very progressive values herself. So I feel fairly comfortable with her.
One of the things we did was look at the five (really six, but one of them isn't relevant to public schools) basic philosophies of education, the three (again, really five, but olfactory and gustatory are never anyone's primaries) sensory modalities for learning (I'm auditory, but we already knew that), and what she called the two major cognitive styles. Her name for them was field-dependent and field-independent, but they're really pretty much the same thing as S and N from the Meyers-Briggs scales. I'm not a pure N, but in every way in which field-independence differs from N, I matched it, apparently; I was the most field-independent person in the room. ("You keep talking about forest people and tree people; what about us leaf people? No one ever talks about us." "It's a pine forest; you see *needles*.")
The trainer is field-dependent and a visual thinker, so she picked me for an example of "flex and stretch" - flexing your coaching language to the other person's styles, and then deliberately using modes that are different to get the other person to perceive things differently. She also used the conversation to demonstrate, for the first time, the problem-resolving coaching map.
I was nearly in tears through most of it, and really tired at the end. In fact, I felt almost exactly like I do after going through a really good Samhain ritual.
On the last day, we practiced the first half of the problem-resolving map with each other. I got paired (fortunately) with the two out-of-towners (both of whom I like) and Mrs. H. from the foreign language department. We went through our round and had a lot of fun practicing. At the end, the out-of-towner who I think looks a lot like I did as a teenager asked me what my pendant meant. I asked Mrs. H. to close her ears and then told the OOT that it was a symbol of my religion.
She brightened and asked "Are you Wiccan?" I could have fallen off my chair.
I nodded. Mrs. H. said, "Now, waddidya wanna hide that from me for?" She was actually a little hurt that I didn't trust her to know I was "a good person" no matter what my religion was. Both she and the OOTers were very accepting; it turns out that that OOT's sister-in-law is Wiccan and that I had reminded her of her previously.
I explained to Mrs. H. that I was worried what her API would think if he found out. She burst out with "Well, if he'd think less of you for it, he's not a very good Christian, is he!"
I've met too many Mrs. Prices and Mr. J's. I keep forgetting how many good, caring, progressive-valued Christians there are out there.
I spent the last Thursday thru Saturday in Cognitive Coaching training (the last day of the training is in February). I love the textbook. Every few pages it states (sometimes quite bluntly, sometimes obliquely) one of the laws of magick. Not, of course, that anyone related to CC would recognize them as such, but that's what they are. So I'll make a little delighted note in the margins. The whole thing is very, very compatible with Pagan values in general and mine in particular; in some ways, CC is all about embodying the Temperance card in order to manifest the Magician in other people. Again, not that they'd ever use or recognize that metaphor.
The trainer, who is one of the two current high-muckety-mucks of Cognitive Coaching (the two original author-implementors having retired), is obviously a person of very progressive values herself. So I feel fairly comfortable with her.
One of the things we did was look at the five (really six, but one of them isn't relevant to public schools) basic philosophies of education, the three (again, really five, but olfactory and gustatory are never anyone's primaries) sensory modalities for learning (I'm auditory, but we already knew that), and what she called the two major cognitive styles. Her name for them was field-dependent and field-independent, but they're really pretty much the same thing as S and N from the Meyers-Briggs scales. I'm not a pure N, but in every way in which field-independence differs from N, I matched it, apparently; I was the most field-independent person in the room. ("You keep talking about forest people and tree people; what about us leaf people? No one ever talks about us." "It's a pine forest; you see *needles*.")
The trainer is field-dependent and a visual thinker, so she picked me for an example of "flex and stretch" - flexing your coaching language to the other person's styles, and then deliberately using modes that are different to get the other person to perceive things differently. She also used the conversation to demonstrate, for the first time, the problem-resolving coaching map.
I was nearly in tears through most of it, and really tired at the end. In fact, I felt almost exactly like I do after going through a really good Samhain ritual.
On the last day, we practiced the first half of the problem-resolving map with each other. I got paired (fortunately) with the two out-of-towners (both of whom I like) and Mrs. H. from the foreign language department. We went through our round and had a lot of fun practicing. At the end, the out-of-towner who I think looks a lot like I did as a teenager asked me what my pendant meant. I asked Mrs. H. to close her ears and then told the OOT that it was a symbol of my religion.
She brightened and asked "Are you Wiccan?" I could have fallen off my chair.
I nodded. Mrs. H. said, "Now, waddidya wanna hide that from me for?" She was actually a little hurt that I didn't trust her to know I was "a good person" no matter what my religion was. Both she and the OOTers were very accepting; it turns out that that OOT's sister-in-law is Wiccan and that I had reminded her of her previously.
I explained to Mrs. H. that I was worried what her API would think if he found out. She burst out with "Well, if he'd think less of you for it, he's not a very good Christian, is he!"
I've met too many Mrs. Prices and Mr. J's. I keep forgetting how many good, caring, progressive-valued Christians there are out there.
